


We Built Another World (Stars Surround You, Here Comes the Nighttime)

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Pizza Place, Coworkers to More-Than-Coworkers, Drinking, Expressing Emotions Through Mixtapes, House Party, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:07:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24340312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Lee works in a pizza shop, and his new coworker is … kind of odd. Luckily for Lee, he likes odd. He really,reallylikes it.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 53
Kudos: 264





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SarcasticallyA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarcasticallyA/gifts).



> This was supposed to be for [Angel's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasticfallenangel) birthday, which was, uh ... over two months ago. I'm sorry this is so late, but I hope you still enjoy it!
> 
> Title is from [We Built Another World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEnIYAfo2a0) by Wolf Parade, which is also what I listened to on repeat while I wrote this. 
> 
> This was supposed to be a oneshot, but I have no self control whatsoever. The second chapter is mostly written and should be out within a week.

_Pizza-themed pick up lines_

Lee types the sentence carefully into his phone, tongue sticking out between his teeth, and mashes the search button with a thumb. He scrolls down the results, and his face floods with heat. 

_Pizza-themed pick up lines (NOT DIRTY!)_ he amends, searching again.

“What are you doing?” 

“Aaah!” Lee sprawls backwards, backside of his jeans scraping the asphalt. He drops his chalk, but he manages to fumble his phone to his chest. He clutches it there as he turns around to see the person who interrupted his work. 

Standing in the doorway to the shop is the new kid--Gaara, Lee thinks his name is, though he has to look at the nameplate pinned to his apron to be sure. He has his visor pulled low over his eyes, so Lee can’t see where he’s looking, but Lee _feels_ Gaara’s eyes on him as he pulls himself back up to sitting. 

Gaara seems … quiet. A little standoffish, maybe. The sentence he just said is the most Lee has heard him speak in the week or so since he’s been hired. Lee’s not worried that he’s a jerk or anything … Naruto doesn’t hire anyone mean, as a rule. He told Lee once that he hires people based on _vibes_ , a sideways endorsement of Lee’s own personal energies that made Lee so overcome with emotion that he squeezed Naruto in a rib-cracking hug. Naruto has made a cross-shaped warding gesture with his hands any time Lee looks like he’s even remotely close to hugging him ever since.

“Um,” Lee falters. “I was just looking up some pizza jokes for the sign. Naruto wanted them to be pick-up lines for Valentine’s day.”

Gaara raises his head a little bit. As the shadow of his visor recedes, Lee gets a good look at his eyes. They’re a clear, stunning blue-green that leaves Lee feeling a little moorless. Gaara’s whole face is handsome, really, in a quirky sort of way: a little on the skinny, sleep-deprived side, with an odd mix of features that make him look very old and very young all at once. 

“It’s March 8th,” Gaara says.

“Yeah,” Lee holds up his phone, open to the page of pizza-themed puns, as if it would offer further explanation, “but Naruto gets kind of … lost? He spent most of last October thinking it was Christmas. It’s better not to mess with it. Correcting him just freaks him out.”

Rather than responding, Gaara plucks the phone from Lee’s hand and begins scrolling through the page. 

“These are terrible,” he says, his face expressionless. 

“I know.”

“Why does he have you doing this? Aren’t you the delivery guy?” 

“I am,” Lee acknowledges. He points to the chalkboard sign with its clumsily hand-drawn picture of a pizza with hearts for pepperonis. “But I have the most legible handwriting out of the crew!”

“Uh-huh.” Gaara hits the home button on Lee’s phone, and his eyes widen slightly. It’s hardly even a change in his expression, but it’s enough for Lee to remember that his home screen right now is a picture of a very muscular, mostly naked man (disrobed to show off his impressive bodybuilding gains, of course! Not for any other reason!). 

Gaara looks up at him. He has hardly any hair to his eyebrows, and they're a light, dishwater blond color that Lee assumes is Gaara's natural hair color, under the clearly homemade dye job. Lee can only tell one of them is arched by the slight wrinkle of the skin on Gaara’s forehead. He tilts the phone back towards Lee. Lee grabs it and hastily shoves it in his pocket. 

“Uh, that’s, um- !” Lee stammers. “It’s … inspiration! For my crossfit competition! I’m trying to build muscle mass!”

“You do crossfit,” Gaara says hollowly. The shadow of his visor falls over his face again, and Lee feels that sensation of Gaara’s eyes crawling up his body again, as tangible as if he’d been grabbed. 

“Yes!” Lee cries, gladly latching onto a topic of conversation that doesn’t have to do with pick-up lines or shirtless, flexing fitness models. He’s always happy to talk about his workout regimen. “In fact, I’m training for a competition in a few weeks. It’s a lot of work, but I really think I’m starting to see some improvement by- ”

Mid-sentence, Gaara blinks and holds up a hand. 

“Naruto sent me to get you,” he says flatly, cutting Lee off. “There’s a delivery.”

Then he turns and vanishes back into the shop. 

“Oh!” Lee scrambles to his feet and follows him.

  


* * *

  


With the last of the dishes drying next to the sink, Lee cuts off the back-of-house lights and shrugs into his jacket. He pulls the hood up over his head as he steps out the back door, jingling the keys in his pocket and humming the last few bars of _Closing Time_ under his breath.

The rain started around the dinner rush, and it hasn’t lightened up since. Lee’s little chalkboard drawing (with its finally settled-upon caption of: _Take it! Take another little pizza my heart now, baby!_ ) was washed away almost as soon as the deluge commenced. It made the night’s deliveries (which only grew more numerous as the storm showed no signs of letting up) an exercise in perseverance. Lee’s uniform pants are spattered almost up to the knees in mud from hopping in and out of puddles on the way to customers' front doors. 

He’s just turning the key in the lock when he sees the figure up against the back wall. He has to squint--between the single floodlight that illuminates the shop’s parking lot once all the signage is turned off and the fog of the rain hitting the pavement distorting what little light there is, visibility is poor--before he recognizes the person standing there. 

It’s Gaara. Just standing in the meager shelter offered by the roof’s overhang and the nearby dumpster. Staring out into the rain with his sweatshirt’s hood pulled low over his face. Lee almost wouldn’t have known it was him at all, if not for his height and slight stature giving him away. 

“Hey,” Lee calls, “I’m about to head out. Are you okay?”

Gaara’s head turns slowly to look at him. Again Lee feels that tactile impression of Gaara’s eyes on him. 

“Just waiting for the rain to lighten up.” 

Lee hadn’t noticed it earlier, but Gaara’s voice is gruff, low for his height. He almost sounds like he has a smoker’s cough, but Lee sees no glow of a cherry. His hands are shoved deep into his pockets, and he’s far away from the bin of sand and ash where Shikamaru takes his smoke breaks. 

“You don’t like driving in the rain?” Lee prompts, walking over to where Gaara’s standing. As he approaches, he notices Gaara stiffening up, standing taller, like how an animal tries to make itself look bigger when it’s under threat. Though Lee is no threat at all; he holds his hands loose, palm-open, telegraphing safety. 

“I don’t have a car.” As Lee gets closer, he sees the shadow of a bicycle taking form behind Gaara’s back, propped up against the rough brickwork. It’s held in place by Gaara's narrow hips, no kickstand in sight. Gaara doesn’t smell like smoke, either, just sweat and the faint spice of cheap deodorant, too much fabric softener and coffee breath as Lee leans close to hear him over the rain. “I biked.” 

“Oh.” Lee looks out into the rain himself. The clouds are low on the horizon, the moon completely blotted out. Where the rain runs off the roof it almost forms sheets of water, shimmering and glossy in the black of the night. Lee checked the weather earlier, when the rain was just starting; it’s not supposed to let up until nearly morning. If Gaara plans to wait it out, he’ll be here for hours. 

“Do you want a ride home?” He turns back to Gaara. Wobbling neon lights from the all-night bakery across the parking lot throw gel-color forms across the planes of Gaara’s face. There’s a splash of pink across his cheekbone, a pale blue parallelogram across one eye. He’s watching Lee carefully, his eyes guarded. Lee offers his most encouraging, gentle smile. “You’ll get soaked trying to get home in this.”

Gaara blinks at him, the motion slow and almost mechanical. He nods. 

“Yeah,” he says roughly. 

They struggle Gaara’s bike into the trunk of Lee’s hatchback, Lee doing most of the heavy lifting while Gaara lets the back seats down to make room. They don’t exactly stay dry doing it, the parking spot Lee chose after his last delivery run more puddle than asphalt, but the trunk door shelters them from the worst of the rain, and their hoods do the rest. It’s still a sight better than biking home completely exposed to the elements, Lee thinks to himself, as they finally squirm damply into their seats and he cuts the heater on. 

His car is on the older side, a bright lime green that means he got it for a steal at the used car lot. Lee works so much overtime that the fabric seats smell like garlic and basil whenever he turns the air on, whether he’s got a delivery in the car or not. The color of the thing has led to the kids in the busier neighborhoods recognizing him on sight, swarming up to his car when he parks like he’s some sort of sauce-and-mozzarella replacement for the ice-cream man. Lee carries extra garlic and cheese sauces in his glove compartment for just these occasions, and hands them out to the kids who ask for them. He can’t exactly give away free product, and he definitely can’t hand off someone else’s delivery order to a bunch of hungry kids, but Shikamaru is the person who does inventory, and he’s admitted to Lee on more than one occasion that he “just eyeballs it” when it comes to the smaller items. Lee’s loath to think about what the kids actually _do_ with the sauces after they run off with them, but it seems to placate them enough. (He swears that once he saw a kid pop the top on one and swallow the contents like he was taking a shot, but he prefers to chalk that up to a carbohydrate-induced hallucination.) 

“Do you live nearby?” he asks Gaara, as the hum of the heater kicks into high gear and the car floods with warm air and the smell of yeast. 

Gaara doesn’t answer, just grabs Lee’s phone from where it’s sitting in the cupholder and starts prodding at it. (Lee doesn’t use a passcode. It’s not like he makes enough money as a pizza delivery guy to have an identity worth stealing, and aside from the slightly incriminating--no, _inspirational_ \--background image, it’s not like he has any love life to speak of, so there’s nothing particularly saucy on there either.) Although he feels like he has nothing to hide, it still sends a little creeping feeling of intrusion through him to see how easily Gaara flicks through his apps. He doesn’t do anything actually invasive, though. Just navigates to the GPS and types in his address, then sets the phone in its holster on the dashboard. 

“In 1,000 feet, turn right,” the GPS’s robotic voice intones, and Lee follows it almost instinctively. This is routine to him, following directions like a second nature, something he can do while the rest of his mind is occupied. 

And occupied it is: by the proximity of Gaara, his thin legs and knobbly wrists. Gaara's not just small, he’s painfully skinny--scrawny, even, like maybe he needs to avail himself of a couple weeks’ worth of crew meals at the shop before he won’t blow over in a strong wind. Lee’ll have to see if he can talk Chouji into making a few double orders on 'accident’, he thinks to himself, the next time he and Gaara are on shift together. 

The drive is short, Gaara’s apartment not far from Lee’s own. Soon Gaara is pointing out the sign to his apartment complex, his skin is so pale it’s almost translucent, veins blue and bulging on the inside of his wrist. Lee can see the bone of his knees through the fabric of his blue jeans as he pulls the door open and stands. 

Lee offers to get the bike out of the back for Gaara, but Gaara brushes him off, hoists the bike out with a quiet grunt and makes for his door without so much as a ‘Thank you’ or ‘Goodnight’. 

Lee watches him go, window down and the rain coming in to soak the passenger seat, listening to the click of Gaara’s bike’s chain and the empty pedals spinning, until he opens his front door and closes it behind him.

  


* * *

  


They get to know each other slowly. It’s a challenge, at least on Lee’s part; Gaara is so quiet, so private. 

“Tell me about yourself,” he invites Gaara one night on the short drive home, between the alternating beats of the windshield wipers, beneath the patter of the rain on the windows. 

Gaara still bikes home most nights, but when it rains (which is more nights than it isn't, with the full of spring upon them), he doesn't ask for a ride. He just stands in the back of the shop like a ghost, silent and watching Lee, until Lee is ready to leave. Lee's gotten the hang of finangling Gaara's bike into the trunk now, and he can do it with almost no effort or assistance on Gaara's part. Lee's thought of asking Gaara if he'd want to be picked up, too, as often as he shows up for his shift fifteen minutes late and dripping wet in a trash bag poncho, but he doesn't quite know how to broach the subject now that they've reached this silent understanding. The routine goes like this: Naruto announces it looks like rain that night, asks Lee to stay 'til close to keep up with the delivery load, and Gaara manifests at his elbow like an apparition the moment it's time to lock up.

Gaara licks his lips, stares out the window. He’s so still, hands balled in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, barely blinking. The wet road hisses beneath the car tires. Lee watches him for a beat until he’s sure his chest is moving, that he’s still breathing. Street lights reflect in his eyes and make them flash, like an animal’s in the woods. 

Lee thinks about a ghost story he heard once as a kid, during the brief time where he got invited to sleepovers, before he got too weird-looking, his voice too loud, his enthusiasm too earnest, his limbs too gangly. The story was about a boy who picked up a girl on a rainy night just like this. He drove her home, because she asked him to. But when they got to the address she gave him, the boy looked up and discovered they were at a cemetery. And when he turned to the passenger seat, the girl was gone. Gaara looks like a ghost sometimes too, on nights like this, glassy eyes and shadowed skin under the flicker of stoplights through the windshield. 

“Nothing to tell,” Gaara says quietly, then nothing else until they pull up outside his door. 

It’s a normal apartment building, just like it was last night, and the night before, but Lee still lets out a little sigh of relief. Gaara sits stock still, eyeing him up and down from his position in the passenger seat, as Lee unlocks the doors. 

“Thanks,” Gaara says, for the first time, once he’s wrestled his bike out of the hatchback and onto the sidewalk. He raps his knuckles on Lee’s window and gives a little wave with just the ends of his fingers. In Lee's mental scorebook, he counts this as a victory. Even through the window, through the haze of rain, Gaara's stare is so intense that Lee feels it physically upon him, heavy.

  


* * *

  


Gaara stares at everything like that, though. 

Lee notices how he watches their coworkers going about their duties. The way he tracks the swish of Ino’s ponytail pacing back and forth to the register, Chouji’s bulk hefting food in and out of the ovens, Shikamaru drifting lazily between the dish sink and the back door. Naruto isn't around as often as Lee thinks a manager probably should be--he passes most of his time in the back office scowling at receipts and hammering frustratedly on the calculator or on the phone yelling the word 'bastard!' down the line at someone Lee hopes isn't a supplier or a sister store--but Gaara's head snaps up any time the office door opens, watching him with that same wary intensity. Gaara spends most of his shifts in the back of house folding boxes, his small fingers quick on the cardboard, his motions mechanical. And those eyes, intent and focused, observing everything around him.

And while Gaara’s watching everyone else, Lee is watching Gaara. 

“Chouji- ” Ino ducks through the cinderblock doorway to the back of house one late afternoon, her hair flipping behind her. “I need you up front _now_.”

Gaara’s whole posture straightens up, instantaneously on high alert.

“You okay?” Chouji rumbles, and Lee watches Gaara crane around the metal partition that separates the kitchen from his folding station to hear them better. 

“Fine.” The tone of Ino’s voice is a hair shriller than usual, clearly upset beneath the sarcastic surface. “Just some asshole.”

“I’ll take care of it.” Chouji thumps her on the shoulder and makes for the front. “Just watch the ovens for me, okay?”

“Yeah,” Ino huffs, but the slump of her shoulders is one of relief. Ino is a tough girl: sharp and borderline abrasive, opinionated and louder even than Naruto when she really gets on a tear, but she’s also a _girl_. A pretty one, working in a shop with all guys. Which means the customers often see her as just another item on the menu, and expect her coworkers to go along with it, too.

“What seems to be the problem here?” Chouji’s booming voice echoes through the small order window and into the back of the shop. Chouji is one of the kindest people Lee has ever met, actually quite sensitive beneath all his smiles and offers of extra food, but his sheer size--six-foot-six if he’s an inch, and just as wide as he is tall--makes him intimidating to the worst of the customers.

Lee can’t make out the customer’s stammered reply, because it’s then that Lee notices Gaara has made his way over to Ino. 

“Do you want to take a break?” he’s whispering, gesturing to the open back door, where a curl of Shikamaru’s cigarette smoke is drifting past, like fog in the clear blue of the spring air. “I’ll watch the ovens.”

Gaara hasn’t been trained on the ovens, of this Lee is certain. But that’s not what piques Lee’s curiosity. It’s the look in Gaara’s eyes as he murmurs his offer, soft and concerned; the cautious distance he affords Ino, careful not to crowd her; the way he positions his body, offering her an escape. 

Ino nods shakily. She brushes past Lee on her way out the back door, and Lee can see her hands are trembling slightly as she fumbles for her phone. 

“Shikamaru!” he hears her bray, as the door starts to swing behind her and comes to rest half-open. “I need a fucking cigarette!”

Gaara’s studying the oven timer, eyebrows furrowed. He opens the oven door and peeks inside, then closes it. His face resumes that flat, expressionless mask, and he stands back and leans against the counter with his arms crossed. 

Then he looks up and catches Lee watching him. 

For a moment they just stand there staring at one another. Gaara blinks very slowly, the way snakes do when they’re first waking up from hibernation. Lee offers a smile that probably looks more like a rictus. 

“Hey,” he calls, “do you want me to show you how to work that?”

Gaara shrugs, but Lee's already making his way over. 

There isn't much to teach, really, just keeping an ear out for the timer and checking the oven window to make sure nothing's burning. Gaara's height makes it something of an ordeal for him to see the top oven rack. When it comes time to pull the first pie out of the oven, his hands wobble on the handle of the thing--Lee isn't sure what it's meant to be called, but he thinks of it as "the big pizza spatula". Whatever its name, Gaara struggles with hoisting it partway over his head and keeping it level, so Lee has to come up behind him and grab the pole to steady it for him so the pizza doesn't end up on the floor. As he's sliding the pizza into the box and showing Gaara how to cut sixths for the smalls, he notices Gaara's eyes aren't focused on the task before them at all. They're trained on the back door, where now twin wisps of smoke curl past the aperture, and Ino's cackling laugh carries over the oven's beep. 

"That was really nice of you," Lee says lowly, so Gaara's the only one who can hear him, "what you did there, for Ino."

Gaara's eyes lose a little bit of their hard edge, though he doesn't turn to look at Lee.

"She reminds me of my sister. They have similar personalities. She's tough, and she doesn't need any help, but…" Gaara looks up at Lee's face. His eyes are shadowed beneath the brim of his hat. "... sometimes you want things, even if you don't need them."

  


* * *

  


Lee starts messing up his orders on purpose between deliveries, adding the wrong sauce or putting the wrong topping on the wrong side of the pizza. Chouji probably notices that almost all of the mistakes are happening on shifts Lee just so happens to share with Gaara, but he doesn't say anything about it. He just winks at Lee as he slots the ruined pizza onto the shelf behind the counter, makes sure his voice carries back to Gaara's prep station when he calls out, "Crew pie!" 

"What _is_ this?" Gaara asks one day, at Lee's elbow after Lee has screwed up yet again. Lee always makes sure to set Gaara up a plate and napkin of his own, because he's the slowest to make it to the crew meals, wandering over minutes later as if he isn't hungry at all, even though Lee knows he hasn't eaten all shift. All he ever sees Gaara ingest otherwise is thermoses of black coffee--massive ones, which he carries under his armpit while he’s steering his bike and drinks from heavily even when his shifts start at 3 PM. He needs to be quicker, Lee thinks, if he wants to eat at all: Shikamaru is surprisingly ravenous for a guy who's basically a bean pole (though that's partially because he smokes weed on shift and partially because he's too lazy to cook for himself at home, so crew meals are sometimes the only thing he eats all week), and Ino will often sneak off with more than her fair share of slices, declaring the day a 'cheat day' (usually several days in a row). 

"I think it's half Korean barbeque and half meatball?" At least, that's what it ended up as, though Lee knows full well the original order was for a loaded nachos pizza. 

The shop has a reputation for odd topping combinations that barely work together, but which make them popular with the college crowd. Naruto is hands-off enough that he basically lets Chouji dictate the menu … which usually ends up as whatever Chouji has a craving for that week. Naruto doesn't even _really_ run the place, technically, even though he acts like he does. The owner is some old man that Lee has never met. Naruto tells him the guy retired a few years ago, leaving the store in the hands of his daughter, but she manages a bunch of different restaurants, so she's never really around to check on them either. ("As long as we keep turning profit, this place is basically my little kingdom," Naruto declared after telling Lee this, kicking his feet up on the messy desk and spreading his arms, the twenty-something pizza lord of all he surveyed. Lee doesn't know if managing a pizza place is how Naruto imagined spending his adulthood, but business keeps at a steady clip, and the guy seems happy enough when he isn't trying to do addition, so Lee hasn't asked either. After all, nobody who works there really has ‘pizza shop employee’ as their ultimate life goal. Chouji’s paying off his culinary school loans, and Ino’s between semesters at her cosmetology program. Rumor has it Shikamaru was attending an Ivy League college before he got expelled in some sort of cheating scandal. And as for Lee … well. It’s not where he wants to be either, but it’s where he’s at, so he makes the best of it.)

Gaara takes a bite of the slice of Korean barbeque pizza Lee put on his plate. His eyes narrow as he chews. 

"This is good," he says quietly. 

Lee notices he doesn't touch the meatball slice at all, but his eyes keep drifting to Lee's untouched, remaining slice of barbeque. 

Lee swaps them out without a word.

After that, he messes up the Korean barbeque pizza orders a lot more often. Gaara doesn't seem to put on any weight, his wrists and elbows just as bony as ever, but at least this way Lee knows he's eating.

  


* * *

  


They don't work together every shift, and even when they work together they don't always close together. Lee picks up closing shifts more and more, even though he's more naturally an early bird than a night owl, and even though it's sometimes inconvenient with his gym's schedule. 

As spring clears into early summer and the rainy nights get fewer and farther between, they develop a new routine on the nights they share a closing shift. Towards the end of shift, while Gaara's sweeping the lobby and Lee's closing down the cold table, Lee will glance out the window. 

"Kind of humid tonight," he'll say. Or, "Kind of cloudy," or, "Kind of muggy." 

And Gaara will say, "Yeah," and grab that scrap of plausible deniability, waiting for Lee by the back door, hoodie up over his face even in the hot summer evenings, his bike's handlebars in his hands and his empty coffee cup under his arm. 

They drive in silence mostly, since Gaara isn't much of a conversationalist. But some nights when Lee's tilting towards exhaustion, too many hours awake, worn thin by the heat of the back room with its ever-on ovens and the weakness of his car's air conditioner, he'll put on some music. 

Lee's playlists are largely pump-me-up gym songs, ‘80s bubblegum pop and top-40 hits from the ‘90s, anything he can keep pace to on a punching bag or treadmill. He knows all the words to 'Eye of the Tiger' by heart, and he sings along to it too, drumming on the steering wheel and mocking a microphone in his empty hand at the stoplights. 

If Gaara's embarrassed when Lee gets too into the music, when he fails to notice the light has turned green and the car behind them starts honking, he doesn't say anything. 

But one night he pulls something out of the front pocket of his hoodie. 

"What's that?" Lee asks.

"I made you a mixtape," Gaara replies, already fiddling with the console, adjusting the sound settings.

"I don't have a tape deck-"

"I know." Gaara punches the eject button and Lee's Spice World CD deploys into his hand, then stows it in the overhead holder on the passenger-side visor, in the empty slot between Willennium and N’Sync’s No Strings Attached. (Tenten’s been begging Lee for years to upgrade his collection and go digital, complaining that the leather CD folder in the back seat makes him look like a soccer mom, but even a cheap MP3 player isn’t really in the budget for him right now, and he doesn’t have enough data on his phone to stream.) 

Gaara holds up the silvery disc from his pocket so it catches the passing streetlights. Both his pale eyebrows arch. “I thought you could use some good music for once.” He doesn’t wait for Lee’s nod of assent before he’s slotting the burned disc into the player. 

The CD hisses as it starts to spin, the car full of nothing but a quiet buzz and whir, the asphalt under the car’s tires and Gaara’s quick breaths. Lee wonders for a moment if Gaara didn’t burn anything onto the CD at all. That maybe he left it completely blank as some sort of snarky commentary on Lee’s taste in music. 

But then the song starts, the quiet plucking of strings and a lone, soft voice. It’s not what Lee would have expected Gaara to listen to. Lee doesn’t know _what_ kind of music he thought Gaara would like: something with thrashing guitars, something punk … heavy metal, maybe. Whatever it was he expected, it was far from this: a melody on strings, soft and intent the way Gaara is. The singer’s voice is scratchy and untrained, warbling over the vowels and catching on the high notes, roughly pronounced, the words hard to understand. 

It’s not really Lee’s style at all: slow and quiet and sleepy, but when he glances over at a stoplight, Gaara’s normally still hands are tapping out the rhythm on the door handle. There’s a quirk to the corner of his mouth--the closest thing to a smile Lee’s ever seen on him. Lee’s heart flutters gently in his chest, the beating of a butterfly’s wet wings when it’s first slipped its cocoon. 

As they pull up outside Gaara’s apartment, Lee is loath to hit the brakes. He would drive all night with Gaara like this, the CD skipping when he hits a pothole, the thrum of the air conditioner and that slight, barely-there smile on Gaara’s shadowed face. 

Gaara pops the door handle. 

“Oh!” Lee starts. “Your CD- !” He fumbles for the eject button. 

“Keep it,” Gaara says as the door closes. “It’s for you.”

He’s briefly illuminated by the headlights, his image blurry like a cheap Polaroid of some unidentified creature. A long, thin shadow in black and grey and white. 

Then, with a rap on the window, he’s gone.

  


* * *

  


“What do you do outside work?” Gaara asks the foggy window one night. A late summer storm blew in mid-afternoon and has since blown past, leaving the air muggy and the car’s cooling system struggling to maintain equilibrium with the humidity of the outside. Gaara’s breath only adds to the patchy white distortion on the glass. “Other than crossfit.”

Lee almost can’t believe that Gaara remembers that snatch of conversation from the first time they talked. It’s hard to know what Gaara internalizes at all, though Lee suspects it’s more than he says (since even now, he hardly says anything at all). 

“I’m working on my associate’s degree!” Lee chirps. Beneath his words, Gaara’s CD clicks and sputters to the next track, now such a constant companion to their nighttime rides that Lee sometimes worries he’ll wear the music right off the disc. “Well. I have been, for a while.” He tugs at the collar of his uniform shirt, the car suddenly stifling despite the fan’s air blowing over his bare skin. “English is really hard. But I’ll get there someday! I just need to keep putting in my best effort!” 

Lee feels Gaara’s eyes traveling down the side of his face. It’s almost gotten to be comfortable, knowing Gaara’s always watching him. At a stop sign, Gaara opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, until Lee cuts him off.

“What about you? Are you in school, or- ?”

Lee has assumed all along that Gaara is a student of some kind. He seems too smart to be anything but. It’s not even that he seems smart, exactly, more … _intense_. He speaks in a perfect, clipped diction that reminds Lee sometimes of Neji, who is by far his most educated friend. The words that come out of Gaara’s mouth at times could rival Shikamaru’s for their SAT vocabulary. Sometimes he drops a word into casual conversation that Lee’s never even _heard_ before, and Lee ends up trying to look it up later by poorly spelling it into Google and puzzling over whether or not any of the results make sense. 

“I was,” Gaara tells his reflection in the side-view mirror. His hands are still now, no longer tapping the door frame to the beat of the now-familiar song, fingers bent and tense. “I’m … on indefinite medical leave.”

Lee doesn’t know what _indefinite_ means, but it sounds bad. He hopes Gaara isn’t seriously sick. Maybe that’s why he’s so pale and thin. Does that mean he’s dying?

“What- ?” 

“It’s the nice way of saying that I dropped out, and the administration made it clean and tidy for me. So I didn’t flunk. In case I ever want to go back.”

“Oh.” Lee says, feeling very stupid indeed. “And … do you? Want to go back?”

Gaara shrugs, a rough, quick movement of his shoulders that looks like nothing so much as someone shouldering off uncomfortable, uninvited physical contact. 

“Maybe. I don’t know. My medicine makes it hard for me to focus. Shredding cheese is about the extent of my cognitive ability these days.” 

“Is it, um- ?” _Terminal?_ Lee doesn’t say. 

“Don’t worry. It’s not contagious,” Gaara says flatly. “You can’t catch it off me.”

“I was going to ask if it’s why you don’t know how to drive.” Lee winces the moment the words leave his mouth. 

“I know how to drive.” There’s a little flash of light, a streetlight catching the gloss of Gaara’s eyes when he rolls them. “It’s just not … safe. So I let my license lapse. Turns out those black box warnings about not operating heavy machinery are really serious.” 

“Oh,” Lee says again, feeling very out of his depth. “I thought that was about, like, backhoes and dump trucks.”

“Backhoes and dump trucks,” Gaara repeats. A little sputtering breath escapes him. He covers his mouth, but Lee can see a crease forming in the corner of his eye, the rippling aftereffect of a smile he’s trying to fight. “No, it’s not about _construction equipment_.”

“But you shouldn’t be steering a crane, either!” Lee interjects, biting off a giggle. 

“I shouldn’t be steering a crane whether I’m medicated or not.” Gaara’s voice is muffled behind his hand. Lee can hear the smile in his vowels.

“Um, we’re here,” Lee reminds him, once his breathing is calm. They have been for a few minutes now actually, sitting outside Gaara’s apartment building, neither of them quite ready to cut off their laughter. 

“Right.” Gaara straightens his shoulders, sits upright. 

A panel of light falls across the parking lot. Gaara’s apartment door is open, the shadow of someone standing there in the doorway falling onto the concrete. Lee can’t see more than the shape of them--tall and bulky, looming. Lee becomes conscious of that uncomfortable _seen_ feeling he’d almost forgotten about, suddenly acutely aware of the light of the streetlamp he’s parked under falling through the windshield to illuminate him, the fact that Gaara’s looking away from him, fumbling with the door lock. 

Warm air rushes into the car as the door opens. The shadow in the doorway is moving. Lee looks away, but he still hears Gaara tap the window.

  


* * *

  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to [We Don't Have Fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRfMoYBnoLc) by Tegan and Sara on repeat while I was writing this. 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: drinking, drug use (weed), unsafe mixing of alcohol and medications, vomiting (non-graphic), some mild peer pressure/bullying vibes; a character kisses someone while blackout drunk; a character gets unintentionally hotboxed.

“Naruto is having a party,” Gaara says. He’s standing just a little too close to Lee, the way he sometimes does now, just an inch or two inside Lee’s personal bubble while he collates his delivery tickets. 

“Oh?” Lee says, half-distracted by Gaara’s proximity and half by re-counting his tickets to make sure he has them all. “What’s the occasion? Naruto’s parties are a lot of fun.” 

Naruto’s parties are more ragers than celebrations, an excuse for most of Naruto’s large friend group to get sloppy drunk in the massive, mostly-empty house he shares with an ever-rotating cast of roommates. Lee always comes away from them feeling hungover, and he doesn’t even drink. 

Gaara shrugs, and then stands there expectantly, watching Lee with that familiar, intent expression on his face. It’s a different look from the blank mask he wears while he’s folding boxes, spaced out and in his own little world, staring into the middle distance. This expression is slightly more open, more insistent, like he’s trying very hard to get Lee to grasp something that Lee can’t quite understand. It’s a feeling familiar to him from his many fruitless English tutoring lessons. 

“Are you going?” Lee prompts, when Gaara hasn’t said anything for a minute. Then, like light dawning, he suddenly realizes why Gaara has mentioned it to him. “Oh, do you need a ride?” 

A wrinkle forms between Gaara’s eyebrows, but then he nods, just a slight jerk of his head. 

“I can pick you up around eleven?” 

“Eleven?” Gaara’s eyes widen fractionally, and Lee grins at him.

“I know. They get started really late.” And usually run until the wee hours of the morning, once half the partygoers are unconscious in varying states of disarray on Naruto’s floor and couch.

“Give me your phone.” Gaara doesn’t wait for Lee to react before he’s taking the phone from Lee’s hand and tapping at the screen. He’s so close Lee can smell the coffee he spilled on his apron this morning. Gaara’s been like this more and more recently: weirdly touchy, possessive, proprietary over Lee and his belongings. Suddenly appearing at Lee’s elbow whenever Lee spends more than a few minutes in conversation with another coworker, like he just wants to remind Lee that he’s there. Grabbing Lee’s jacket from the hook by the door for him at the end of the day, holding it out like he almost expects Lee to step into it instead of taking it from him and putting it on himself.

Gaara’s on some screen Lee doesn’t even recognize, some sort of directory that Lee’s never seen before, though he notices his own phone number is on the screen. Gaara’s eyes scan the number, seeming to memorize it, before he hands it back to Lee with a nod. 

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out an ancient flip phone, the type Lee hasn’t seen in at least ten years. 

“I don’t really text,” he says, “but I’ll give you my number so you can let me know if you’re running late.”

“ _Can_ you even text on that thing?” blurts Lee, who has never been less than fifteen minutes early for anything in his life. 

Gaara nods, and his thumbs seem to fly across the number pad of his scuffed little phone for an inordinate amount of time before Lee’s phone buzzes in his hand. 

**Hi.** the text reads. **It’s Gaara.**

Lee saves the number with a smiley face next to Gaara’s name.

  


* * *

  


“What are you wearing to this thing?” Tenten asks, rolled over on her back on Lee’s futon bed, hair loose and dangling down onto the cracked wood of the floor.

“Uh,” Lee says eloquently, pulling open his dresser drawers and examining the scant options within. “I was thinking just basketball shorts?” He holds up his favorite pair of day-off shorts, the ones that cover enough of his legs that he can wear them to the grocery store after he’s finished at the gym. 

“No!” Tenten shrieks, rolling over onto her stomach and clutching her face in mock horror. “Neji!”

Neji appears in the doorway with a disgruntled expression on his face. He’s holding a pair of tweezers and his hair is still wet from the shower. 

“What.”

“Tell Lee he can’t wear _shorts_ to a party with his crush!” 

“I don’t have a crush on- !” Lee begins to object.

“He can wear shorts,” Neji interrupts him. 

“Thank you, Neji!” Lee pumps his fist. Point one to him.

“Not whatever ones you’re thinking of,” Neji cuts him off, and Lee deflates. “Good God, are those _green polyester?_ ”

Lee peeks at the tag. “It’s a poly-cotton blend- ”

“I have to do everything around here.” Neji snatches the offending shorts from Lee’s hand and throws them to the floor, then starts tearing through Lee’s drawers like a man possessed.

Meanwhile, Tenten has gained her feet and is tousling Lee’s hair from behind, staring over his shoulder into the mirror with a critical look on her face. She pushes his bangs out of his face with a scowl, then ruffles the hair back into place. 

“How do you feel about mousse?” 

“I don’t think I own any mousse,” Lee reminds her. 

“That’s fine. I have some leftover from when I had that undercut a few years ago … you remember?” Tenten suppresses a shudder. “All the girls did them together, but mine came out all crooked because I did it myself with a pair of clippers in the bathroom?” 

Lee has only the faintest memory of this event, but he does recall that Tenten tried to ‘rock it’ for a few days before giving in and simply wearing her hair down until the back started growing in. He nods, squaring his shoulders in the mirror. 

“Neji, can you go in my bathroom and get the purple tub from the top left drawer?” 

“I’m a little busy here.” Neji’s voice comes out muffled. When Lee turns to look at him, he’s standing up from the depths of Lee’s dresser drawers with a handful of varicolored tank tops. “Do you own _anything_ that isn’t meant to be worn to a gym?” 

“I mean, there’s my work uniform, but--” 

“No.” Neji stops Lee in his tracks. “We will not even entertain the idea of you wearing the uniform khakis. I’ll see if I have anything that will fit you. And yes, Tenten--” He cuts her off with a raised hand as he stalks past them and out of Lee’s bedroom. “--I’ll get the mousse, too.”

When Neji returns, he’s brandishing a pair of unfolded shorts like a weapon. They’re pale pink-orange chinos, neatly creased down the front of each leg. They look like they’ve never been worn. 

“I bought these online a few years ago, but they were too big.” Neji holds the garment up in front of him by the waistband and squints in Lee’s direction as if analyzing him. “I think they’ll fit you.”

“They’re pink,” Lee says, voice tinged with alarm. 

“They’re _salmon_ ,” Neji corrects him sharply. “It’s a very stylish color.” 

He lays them out on the bed, then slaps the little jar of mousse into Tenten’s hand. She unscrews it, and a faintly floral smell fills the room. 

Lee’s eyebrows raise in alarm. “That certainly smells, uh! Strong!” 

Tenten ruffles his hair back. “What, are you worried Gaara is going to think you’re a girl because you used nice-smelling hair product?” She claps Lee on both shoulders, squeezing his biceps. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about there.” 

Lee blushes, and Tenten spins him bodily around so he can no longer see what she’s doing.

“Okay,” she says, her voice hard with determination. “Let’s get started.”

  


* * *

  


Lee sits in his car in the darkened apartment parking lot, fiddling with his keys. The night is chill and quiet, the jingle of his keys and the idling of the car’s engine the only sounds. His phone rests face-down on his jiggling knee, atop the chino shorts that, to Lee’s dismay, ended up fitting perfectly. He can almost feel the last words on his darkened screen burning through to his skin, a message to Gaara to let him know he’s outside. 

He raises his hand to fix his bangs, one of his many nervous habits, and encounters only hard plastic instead: the snapback fastener of the hat he jammed onto his head on his way out the door, uncomfortable with how exposed Tenten’s new hairstyle made him feel. 

There’s no light on above Gaara’s door. Staring into the dark hollow that marks Gaara’s apartment number, Lee’s mind rolls over in time to the churn of the engine. 

Gaara doesn’t disclose much about himself. His past is as shadowed to Lee as his doorway is right now. His interests, his preferences, his emotions … it’s all a murky blur. Lee has never had a friend quite like Gaara, if he can call their tentative bond _friendship_. It’s hard enough for Lee to tell if Gaara even considers him a friend. Lee’s hand drops to the steering wheel, fist tightening into the soft rubber. 

Lee’s never met someone so difficult to read, whose rare smiles only appear behind his hand, and are all the more beautiful for it. _If_ Lee were to find himself developing a crush--which he isn’t admitting yet that he is--he doesn’t know if Gaara would even be interested in him _like that_. 

There’s a rainbow flag hanging in the window of one of the rooms in Gaara’s apartment--or, at least, the windows that Lee assumes belong to Gaara’s apartment--serving as a makeshift curtain. If it _is_ Gaara’s apartment, Lee has no way of knowing if it’s Gaara’s room or someone else’s. He might have a roommate, Lee thinks, based on the shadowed form that comes out onto the doorstep the nights they spend too much in the front seat of the car, headlights on and engine still running, Lee finishing up a too-long anecdote or Gaara staring at him, mouth parted as if he’s about to say something that never comes out. 

Gaara mentioned a brother once, in passing, the day he showed up to work in a black hoodie three sizes too large after his got rain-soaked the day before. That might be the person who lives in the rainbow-flag room, who looms in the doorway waiting for Gaara to come in, silently protective. Lee considers, for a moment: suppose Gaara’s brother looks like him. Suppose his brother is the one who’s gay … maybe Lee could-- 

He shakes his head to kill the thought. No way! Gaara is one-of-a-kind. 

There’s a tap on the window. Lee turns with a start to find Gaara standing at the passenger side door, hand poised on the door handle and waiting for Lee to unlock the car. 

The automatic lock clicks, and Gaara pulls the door open. 

“That bad, huh?” he says drily, regarding Lee’s taken-aback expression. 

“No! Not at all!” Lee stammers, turning quickly to face the windshield, hoping the dark conceals the way his face is heating. “You look- You look great!” 

It’s the truth, too. Gaara looks amazing. Lee hardly recognizes him out of his pizza shop uniform, effortlessly poised in a flannel just a few shades darker red than his hair, the sleeves rolled and the long expanse of his slender arms revealed. There’s something jarring in seeing him look so casual, as if their relationship has taken a sudden, unsteady leap away from _coworkers_. 

Gaara’s normally unruly hair is tidily parted and combed, so Lee can see his whole face without the shadow of a visor brim hanging over his mercury-bright eyes. There’s a dark splotch on his forehead, just below where his hair parts--a birthmark, Lee realizes. It’s shaped almost exactly like a heart. 

Lee’s heart flutters in turn. 

Lee can see Gaara’s face reflected faintly in the windshield, ghost-translucent. The way his eyebrows raise, face softening. The birthmark at his hairline wrinkling. 

There’s a tug at the hem of Lee’s shorts. He looks down to see Gaara’s skinny index finger and thumb pinching at the fabric. Gaara’s hand is precariously close to the bare skin of Lee’s knee. 

“These are nice,” he says in that low voice. 

Lee lets out an exaggerated groan, forehead dipping to hit the steering wheel. 

“My roommates picked them out.”

Gaara gives a little considering hum, and Lee is suddenly, acutely aware of the absence of his hand as he withdraws it. The center console stands between them like a breakwater. 

“They have good taste. It’s a good color on you.” 

It’s like a switch flips in Lee’s head. Gaara’s endorsement of the shorts has him suddenly feeling much more endeared to them than he was mere moments before. Like maybe they aren’t so bad after all. 

“Thank you,” he says, trying to ignore the way his cheeks are heating. 

There’s a click, a fumbling of hands and fabric. The CD player buzzes as Gaara fiddles with the radio dials. Lee focuses on putting the car into drive so he doesn’t think about the way Gaara’s leaned back into his space, the exposed skin of his bony wrist in the periphery of Lee’s vision, those long fingers that were just _almost_ touching him. 

“I made you a new CD,” Gaara says. 

He presses _play_ , and then neither of them say anything for a long while.

  


* * *

  


The bass of the music is audible from halfway up the block. Naruto’s house sticks out like a sore thumb in the residential cul-de-sac, obviously the location of the party even without the spill of cars in the driveway and people clutching red plastic cups in the unmowed front yard. The mailbox is bright orange. Lee has to park outside a neighbor’s house, the crowd already thick and thronging. 

They enter through the propped-open front door, Gaara hewing close behind Lee. He shelters so closely that Lee swears he feels Gaara’s hand brushing his t-shirt at the small of his back, as if Lee is his protector or- or his _date_ , or something. 

Naruto has far too many friends and acquaintances, most of them people Lee doesn’t even recognize, filtering in and out of the mostly-empty rooms of his sprawling house like tides, a blur of flashing light and sensation. Lee considers himself an outgoing person, but the throb of the music is a bit much even for him. It’s overwhelming after the quiet intimacy of the car, where Gaara’s breathing and the rush of air past the poorly sealed windows served as counterpoint to the throaty singing of the frontman of a band Lee’s never heard of. 

Lee fords the sea of people to the kitchen, where Ino’s sitting on the counter in a too-short skirt, ankles kicking. There’s glittery lotion up and down her long legs, and she’s manning the keg that dominates the space, filling red Solo cups with water-thin beer. 

Lee barely has time to be aware of Gaara’s absence before he’s back, silently nudging Lee’s elbow with a cup clutched in each hand. Lee turns, and Gaara holds one out to him. 

Lee puts his hand up. 

“Sorry, I don’t drink.” 

Behind the kitchen counter, Chouji guffaws. He’s lording over the stove, the kitchen stuffy with the heat and smell of whatever he’s got in the oven, silvery foil catering trays spread around him and overflowing with snacks. Most house parties don’t come personally catered, but Chouji loves any excuse to flex his skills in the kitchen. 

“Lee’s a complete lightweight,” he booms. “That’s why he’s straight edge.”

Lee bristles. “I am _not_ straight edge.” 

“Really?” Shikamaru drawls from where he’s leaned up against the counter, half-concealed by Chouji’s bulk. He’s propped on his elbows with a posture of bone-weariness like they’re the only thing holding his body up, and there’s a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth where a cigarette would normally be. Presumably he’s there to help Chouji, but so far all Lee has seen him do is steal sausage bites as they’re cooling. He lifts a half-full plastic cup to his mouth, holding up three fingers. “You don’t drink.” He folds down his middle finger. “You don’t smoke.” His long, nicotine-stained index finger folds in beside it. “And you don’t even cuss.” His thumb folds down and now he’s gesturing at Lee with his fist, like an old man telling a kid to get off his lawn. 

“I can curse!” Lee splutters. 

Chouji arches an eyebrow. “You can?” He’s grinning as he pulls a tray of something out of the oven, all joviality through the haze of steam. “I’ve never heard it.”

Lee’s neck is hot under his collar, and it’s not from the open oven.

“Yeah,” Ino chimes in, leaning in close, a sly smile on her face. “Go ahead. Swear right now.”

“Well, this is hardly the time or place- ” Lee stammers. He’s acutely aware of Gaara’s eyes on the side of his face, the stifling proximity of Gaara’s body to his. He feels his ears heat. The last thing he wants is for Gaara to think he’s crass, but he wants even less for Gaara to think he’s the sort of person who would back down from a challenge.

Shikamaru’s smirking, head cocked back and toothpick bobbing in his mouth. 

Chouji and Ino start banging on the counter, chanting, “Cuss, cuss, cuss, cuss!”

Lee screws up his face, fists clenched.

“See, what’d I tell ya?” Shikamaru’s voice carries over the din. “Straight edge.”

“Piss!” Lee shouts. 

The whole bustling kitchen falls silent. A bassline throbs dully from the living room and resounds off the linoleum. 

Chouji and Shikamaru burst into simultaneous raucous laughter. Ino’s cackling so hard she almost slips off the counter, wiping her eyes. 

Lee turns to look at Gaara, face burning. 

Gaara arches an eyebrow, but he stays mum. His face betrays no trace of amusement. His hand has been held out towards Lee for the duration of the conversation, but suddenly he pulls it back, squinting into the depths of the cup. After a moment’s deliberation, he slams the drink back, draining it in a single pull. Then he stacks the still-full cup in his other hand into the empty one. He turns to stare at Shikamaru and Chouji, who are still doubled over, pounding each other on the back as the kitchen timer beeps incessantly. 

Lee is stuck staring, mouth agape, at the pale column of Gaara’s neck, his profile with its scrunched-up, button nose. He never would have taken Gaara for a heavy drinker. 

Shikamaru tilts his head back, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. “Oh man,” he says, “holy shit. It’s not even midnight and that’s gonna be the funniest thing that happens all night.”

There’s an insistent tug at the back of Lee’s shirt sleeve, and he looks down to see Gaara has edged closer. He’s acutely aware of the way Gaara’s fingertip brushes the back of his bicep as he drops his hand. 

“What’s up?” Lee asks. 

Gaara tilts his head towards the living room, where the bass has changed from a simple 4-4 rhythm to something altogether more frenetic.

“Oh! I’ll see you guys later!” he calls over his shoulder, turning to lead Gaara to the living room. 

“They were making fun of you,” Gaara murmurs as they cross through the doorway. His mouth is close enough to Lee’s ear that he can still be heard over the hammering techno beat. 

“It’s all in good fun,” Lee reassures him. “They’re just playing around.”

Gaara’s eyes narrow, and he takes a long sip of his drink. 

The living room is more of the same, teeming with Naruto’s friends, awash in loud voices and cheap beer sloshed out of flimsy plastic cups. There’s an amorphous circle of bodies grinding on each other in the middle of the room, and off in one corner, someone has set up a game of beer pong on the bare floor. 

“Is there anywhere to sit down?” Gaara says, his mouth right at the shell of Lee’s ear, fingers clenched in the fabric of Lee’s sleeve. 

Lee casts his gaze around, but doesn’t see anything readily available. The room is sparse; there’s a futon pressed up against one wall, but it’s stacked end-to-end with people, several of whom are half onto each other’s laps in heated conversation or even more heated embraces. 

“We can go look,” he half-shouts back. 

He uses his body like the prow of a ship in the crowd, forging the way for Gaara to pass while they search fruitlessly for any unoccupied horizontal surface. 

He’s not really looking at his feet, and that’s how he almost trips over one of Naruto’s roommates. She’s fiddling with the laptop plugged into the speakers, fussing with the playlist with her head ducked down into the high collar of an unseasonably heavy jacket. Even though she’s tall, she’s so hunched into herself that she’s almost made herself invisible. 

“I’m so sorry, uh- !” Lee blurts, searching for her name in his memory. 

Lee hasn’t met her formally, but he’s seen her in passing once or twice. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard her speak, and as the awkward moments pass, he’s increasingly sure he doesn’t know her name. He’s pretty sure she’s distantly related to Neji in some way--a second cousin once-removed or a step-half-sibling or a quarter-niece or something like that. Neji’s family tree is so convoluted that Lee’s mind goes static every time Neji starts to explain it. 

He’s saved from the ongoing mortification by Naruto barreling in between their bodies, arms extended to sling Lee and Gaara into a completely uninvited hug. 

The girl opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, but Naruto is already shouting, “Hey guys! Glad you could make it! Whoa- !” His eyes bug comically out of his head at the stack of cups in Gaara’s hand, which seem to have multiplied while Lee wasn’t paying attention. “Bushy Brows, you’re not drinkin’, are ya?” 

“I don’t dr-” Lee starts to say.

“Did they tell ya this guy is a _huge_ lightweight?” Naruto elbows Gaara, eyebrows waggling. “Can’t hold his liquor at all. Last time I saw him drinking, he got so trashed he- ”

“I’m sure Gaara does not want to hear that very boring story!” Lee cuts him off frantically.

“What?” Naruto rolls his eyes. “Oh, c’mon, it’s funny. Listen, he was so drunk that he- ”

“N-Naruto,” a high pitched voice cuts under the noise. Lee is surprised to see Naruto’s roommate still standing there, twiddling her fingers; he’s even more surprised he was able to hear her, with how tremulous her voice sounds. 

“Wha- ? Oh, hey, Hinata!” Naruto drops his arms from around Lee and Gaara’s shoulders. Immediately, Gaara closes the gap between them, hand hovering just below Lee’s elbow. “I didn’t even see ya there! Listen, were you here the time Bushy Brows got really drunk? I can’t believe he told Sakura he was in love with her!” 

The bottom drops out from Lee’s stomach. 

“I don’t think there is any need to rehash the past!” Lee yelps. “I have already made my apologies to Sakura for my exceedingly rude behavior and I will not make the mistake of becoming intoxicated again!” He can hear his voice growing increasingly clipped and formal the more frantic he gets. Gaara takes a step back as Lee’s voice goes shrill. 

“Yeah man it’s all good, bygones are bygones right?” Naruto barks a laugh. He’s slung his arm around Hinata’s shoulders now, and her face is so red it could serve as a stoplight. “C’mon,” he yells at the side of her head, “I need another drink! See you guys around! And no drinking for you!” 

He shoots Lee double finger-guns and breezes off, leaving him standing there with Gaara. Gaara is saying something, Lee thinks, or at least his mouth is moving, but he can’t hear it over the blood rushing in his ears. 

“I need some air,” Lee blurts. He tugs away from Gaara’s hand on the back of his arm and staggers through the crowded living room. In another room off to the side, the floor is dominated by a low coffee table. The room is thick with smoke, and Shikamaru is squatted down beside the table, rolling a joint. 

Lee shoulders his way out the side door and washes up, gasping for breath on the back porch. It’s muggy outside, but the night air feels cool on his skin after the hot press of bodies in the house. He sprawls boneless on one of Naruto’s broken-down plastic Adirondack chairs, the seat spotted with mildew. 

He isn’t sure how long he sits there, catching his breath, before Gaara finds him again. 

There’s a tapping noise on the window by his head, and he looks up to see Gaara hovering over him, spectral thin and shrouded by the mist coming up off the grass. He looms large in Lee’s vision, half in shadow from the house lights blazing through the windows. He smiles at Lee, all flashing eyes and sharp teeth. He looks like the kind of animal your parents warn you about, the ones that bite. 

Lee thinks he might want to be bitten. 

“Hey,” Gaara says, and staggers a little closer to Lee. His hands clap the arms of the chair, so he’s splayed over Lee’s body, pinning him in place with proximity. 

“I’m sorry for running out like that,” Lee starts to ramble. “It was just so stuffy in there, and I- ”

“There’s a girl you’re in love with?” Gaara cuts him off, his words all running together. 

“No!” Lee nearly shouts it. “I just- I got overemotional while discussing a childhood crush- It was all a big misunderstanding, really. I- !” 

“That’s good.” Gaara draws out the vowel: _goo-oo-ood_. He stumbles over nothing and his knee lands between Lee’s spread legs on the seat of the chair. He smells wrong, like cheap beer and weed smoke. 

“Have you been smoking?” Lee asks. 

Gaara chuckles, shaking his head. Light catches on the sharp points of his canines. His face is too near to Lee’s neck, teeth bared. A lock of hair has fallen from his neat combed-back coif and hangs in front of his birthmark, a shock of dyed bright red cutting the bloodstain shape in half. 

“Someone blew smoke under the bathroom door while I was taking a piss,” he slurs. 

“They hotboxed you in the _bathroom_?” 

Gaara leans a little closer, his smile growing slow until it’s all-teeth, Cheshire-like, taking up half his face. In the scant light, Lee can see his light eyes are hazy, eyelids swollen red around that seaglass blue. 

“Lee,” he says, his voice dripping honey, scraped low like it was carved out of stone, “I’m gonna kiss you now.” 

And then he does. 

Gaara’s mouth is hot and sloppy, his lips wet, his movements graceless. Lee braces up against the plastic of the chair back and Gaara presses him into it hard with the weight of his slight body, scrambling up until he’s straddling one of Lee’s legs, making a soft, low noise against Lee’s lips. Lee doesn’t know why he’s always thought Gaara’s skin would be cool and clammy, but that vampire paleness must have been deceptive because Gaara is blazing, skin hot like they’re both being burned at the stake. 

For a moment, it’s easy for Lee to respond, to let his shocked mouth slack open at the pressure of Gaara’s hands on his cheeks, to grab for Gaara’s narrow waist where Gaara’s writhing against him like he wants to open Lee up and climb inside. Gaara’s tongue slips insistent into Lee’s mouth, licks along the roof of his mouth, the sharp bitter taste of bad beer all over his lips. Lee’s heart slams his ribcage so hard it makes him breathless, out of step with the music vibrating the boards of the porch. He loses his breath in Gaara’s smoke-foggy mouth. Gaara bites his lip so hard he feels it in the base of his spine, nerves twanging.

Lee is twenty-five, and this is his first kiss, and the guy kissing him probably won’t even remember it in the morning. 

His shaking hands find Gaara’s shoulders. He moves Gaara away from him in a motion too gentle to be misconstrued as a push. Gaara disengages from Lee’s mouth with a damp breath that’s more gasp than inhale. He whines low in his throat, eyes narrowed and searching all over Lee’s face, his expression a combination of dismay and frustration. He’s biting his own lip now, the skin around his mouth damp and swollen pink. He runs his hand up the side of Lee’s face and knocks his hat back. 

“That’s better,” he says. He smiles slyly. “You look more like yourself now.” Then he starts leaning back in.

“Gaara,” Lee says, chest heaving to catch his breath. He feels his hat slip off the back of his head and behind the chair, lost to the porch. “I’m driving you home.”

  


* * *

  


Lee quickly identifies that, without the chair as a crutch, Gaara is too drunk to stand up straight. He wrangles his arm around Gaara’s narrow ribs, gets Gaara’s arm slung over his shoulders. 

They make it halfway into the house before Gaara loses his footing over a doorjamb, almost sprawling into the kitchen.

“Oops,” he mumbles. He gives Lee a look of faint, panicky distress before his knees buckle, and he starts to slide to the linoleum. 

Lee kneels down next to him, lowering him to the floor.

“Can you stand?” he whispers. 

Gaara shakes his head, staring at the tile as though it’s the most fascinating thing in the world, finger idly tracing the sticky grout. Lee grimaces. Before he can think about it too much, he slots the arm that isn’t around Gaara’s upper body under his knees. 

“I’m going to pick you up now, okay?” he asks, as if Gaara has any way of getting out of this house without Lee’s help. As if Lee has any intention of leaving him lying there on a filthy kitchen floor while partygoers step around him, seemingly oblivious to him halfway into blackout. 

Gaara nods, and his head knocks into Lee’s shoulder as Lee staggers into a standing position with him in a princess carry. He hardly weighs anything at all, even as deadweight. 

The assembled crowd cheers as they make their way into the living room, as Lee heaves them both through the front door, back halfway bowed under Gaara’s unruly limbs, hat long forgotten. Gaara rubs his face against Lee’s collarbone. His forehead is clammy damp against the bare skin of Lee’s neck. A wave of revulsion rises in Lee’s gut, driven on by the hoots and cries of the people at his back. He isn’t sure whether the feeling is directed at the partygoers or at himself. 

Lee knows the way to Gaara’s apartment complex by heart now, so it doesn’t matter that Gaara unspeakingly lolls his head against the window, fogging it with the sweat of his brow. Thin fingers pluck the seatbelt like guitar strings; one of Gaara’s skinny knees sprawls all the way into the console, centimeters from Lee’s fingers on the gearshift. 

Lee turns the music all the way down. It’s far too loud even after the noise of the house party. Gaara is breathing heavy over the singer’s warbling voice, exhales ragged. 

“I’m gonna puke,” Gaara announces, just a few streets away from his neighborhood. 

Lee lurches off the road so fast he gets honked at by the car behind them, in just enough time for Gaara to fumble off his seatbelt. He makes it most of the way outside before the gagging noises start. He dives face-first into the closest bush, and Lee watches through the spread fingers of his hand, just to make sure Gaara doesn’t hurt himself. The branches look sharp; Gaara could lose an eye if he keeps stumbling around like that. 

“I got barf on my shoe,” Gaara mumbles, once he’s back in the car. He plunges the seatbelt at its latch several impotent times before Lee pries the belt from his fingers and buckles him in. 

“I’m sure you can wash it,” Lee reassures him. “I didn’t realize you had so much to drink. I would have said something.” 

“It wasn’t that much,” Gaara slurs. “I’m just not supposed to drink on my meds.” 

Lee’s eyebrows hit his hairline. There’s a quiet _thunk_ as Gaara’s head hits the window, followed by a quiet, snuffling snore. 

It’s only a faint relief that they aren’t that far from Gaara’s apartment, even fainter that there’s a light on in the window without the rainbow flag. Gaara doesn’t awaken when Lee opens the passenger-side door, so Lee leans over his booze-stinking, sweaty body to unbuckle his seatbelt. He hefts Gaara over his shoulder to carry him to the door. 

His pounding on the wood is answered in short order. The guy who answers the door looks like a rejected drummer from a punk-rock band: spiked hair, pierced lip and eyebrow, eyeliner smudged around his eyes widely enough to rival even Gaara’s sleep-deprived dark circles. He’s both taller and broader than Lee, and he would almost be intimidating if it weren’t for the fact that he’s wearing full-body footie pajamas with cat ears on the hood. 

“Holy shit,” he greets them. “I haven’t seen him like this in a while.” 

He gestures Lee inside, eyes narrowing as he scans Gaara’s body. Lee’s hands are cautiously positioned on the back of Gaara’s knees and the small of his back, all propriety, but he still feels self-conscious as he steps into the living room. 

The room is mostly dark, side-lit by a light that’s on in some distant bedroom, the shapes of furniture like the shadows of hulking beasts. There’s an ancient episode of some Japanese TV show playing on the small television on the corner, pixelated rangers in washed-out staticky technicolor frozen on the screen while the pause button blinks. 

“Put him on the couch,” the guy directs, and Lee gropes around with his feet until he locates what seems to be the right piece of furniture. He sets Gaara down as gently as he can manage; Gaara’s body slumps backwards into the cushions like a puppet with all the strings cut. He has drool on his face. The faint light of the television illuminates his breathing, the ebb and flow of his bird-bone chest. 

“You’re Lee, right?” The voice comes from far too close for comfort, and Lee jumps back away from Gaara with his hands half-raised, nodding his confession. 

Gaara’s brother (roommate? bodyguard?) doesn’t bother introducing himself. His eyes narrow into a scowl. “You didn’t, like … _do_ anything with him, right?” 

Lee grabs at his heart where it thunders anxiously in his chest. “Of course not!” he blusters, prickly and offended. “I would never- !”

“Good,” Gaara’s brother says, and claps him on the shoulder with bruising force, steering Lee back towards the front door. “Because if I find out you fucking touched him-” 

Lee half-tumbles onto the stoop. The glare of the man looming in the doorway cuts him like a knife. He gestures to his throat in a slicing motion, one eyebrow cocked. 

“I didn’t- !” Lee shouts.

Without another word, Gaara’s brother closes the door. Lee hears the click of the lock. 

He turns off the CD player when he gets back in the car, drives home in silence.

  


* * *

  


Lee is sitting in his car. It’s hot, inside and out, and he can barely see the vague, fuzzy shape of the house he’s supposed to be delivering to. He checks the address, looks at the receipt, but the house numbers fall out of his head as soon as he tries to read them, black figures swimming in his vision. 

The driver’s side door latch clicks. The door opens. Standing outside in the fug of the summer air is Gaara, wearing his pizza shop uniform. The visor is drawn down low over his face. 

He climbs into Lee’s lap before Lee has time to register the strangeness. He doesn’t think about how the distance between his chest and the steering wheel is too narrow even for Gaara’s slight body. 

Then Gaara’s kissing him, mouth hotter than the air outside, skin wet with humidity. He pulls Lee’s hair, shifts in his lap, makes little groaning noises just on the edge of hearing. He bites at Lee’s earlobe and whispers something Lee can’t quite make out. 

There’s a tapping on the window, slow and ominous. Lee thinks of an urban legend he heard as a kid, where an escaped prisoner drags his hook along the car door of two teenagers who broke down late at night. Or was the tapping they heard from the shoes of the boy who got out to look, hanging from the tree overhead? When Lee looks up, Gaara’s standing close outside the car window, breath fogging the glass. He’s wearing his outfit from the party, sleeves rolled and lean forearms in stark relief. Tap-tap-tap goes the noise on the glass. The air outside is heavy with fog--or is it smoke?--and Lee can’t see the expression on his face. 

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Gaara-in-his-lap asks, face all in shadow from Lee’s snapback brim. He grinds on Lee’s lap, slow and sweet. 

“Of course,” Lee tries to tell him, but the words are sticky in his mouth. They come out muffled and backwards. 

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Gaara repeats, and Lee remembers this story too. 

He doesn’t remember the right words to say. He tries to lift his hands to hold Gaara’s waist still, but it’s like moving through mud. Everything is cotton-wool dull except Gaara’s hot breath on his neck when he whispers, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

“I do,” Lee says, with his teeth the wrong way in his mouth. “I really, really like you.” 

“How about now?” Gaara pulls his hat off, and his face is gone, skin covered in one dark, heart-shaped birthmark. 

Lee wakes up sweaty. 

Even alone in his room he’s embarrassed to be so obviously physically compromised by what was arguably a nightmare. He tries to will his erection down, and when that doesn’t work, he spends so long in the shower that Neji starts hammering on the door, yelling something about the water bill. 

His phone is rattling around the nightstand when he hurries back to his room, suds still dripping around his damp ankles. It’s his alarm clock, even though he doesn’t have to work today, and thank goodness for small mercies, because he’s _exhausted_. He deadens the noise. The still-open text message window on his screen reminds him that Gaara _does_ have a shift today, an opening shift even. Lee can’t imagine trying to work with a hangover like the one Gaara must be nursing right now. Maybe he called in sick? But if everyone who was hungover called in, there would be nobody to open the store. 

Even as he goes through his morning workout, which is usually extremely effective at clearing his mind, he can’t stop thinking about Gaara. The burn of his muscles in a squat recalls the heat of Gaara’s skin where they touched; the clatter of weights into the rack brings to mind the tapping of a fingernail on his car window. 

After his cooldown, he can’t take the suspense any longer. He chugs half a bottle of water and pulls out his phone.

 **I hope you are feeling better this morning!** he writes, then glances at the clock to confirm that, yes, it’s still just shy of 11 AM. **Remember to drink plenty of water and take an aspirin if you need one!**

The wait for a reply is interminable. Lee’s heart clenches so tight in his chest that he tries to distract himself with wiping down the machines and packing his gym bag. 

He’s in his second cold shower of the day when he hears the phone vibrate. He dives out of the shower and grapples with the screen with still-sodden fingers. 

There’s only one word in Gaara’s reply: **Yeah.**

Lee clutches the phone to his chest like that will help slow the hammering of his heartbeat.

  


* * *

  


It’s several days before they have another shift together. 

Some unspecified tension simmers under the distance between them. Lee keeps trying to broach the space, only for Gaara to back away, gun-shy and awkward, silent as he was when they first met. Lee tries to catch Gaara’s eye, but every time Gaara sees him looking, he ducks his head. 

When Lee ruins a barbeque pizza on purpose, Gaara doesn’t show up to eat it. He stays parked at his prep station, the wall of cardboard boxes growing around him like battlements. 

The moment Gaara finishes his cleanup work, he vanishes into the night without waiting for Lee to lock up and offer him a ride. A sprinkle of raindrops fizzes on the still-hot asphalt of the parking lot, Gaara’s bike conspicuously absent from its space propped against the back wall. 

It’s pouring down rain the following day as Lee dresses for work. 

**It’s raining cats and dogs out there! I can come pick you up if you want.** he texts Gaara, perhaps a bit desperately. 

There’s no response, and Gaara shows up for his shift twenty minutes late, dripping water and fury like a cat that’s fallen in the bath. He leaves stagnant, muddy puddles behind the prep table where he stands. 

Lee catches him on his break briefly removing his visor to push soggy hair back from his forehead, gets a glimpse of his birthmark dark against pale skin. Lee gestures at the back door and mimes turning a steering wheel in his hands, eyebrows raised. Gaara hunches his shoulders and slams the hat back on his head. He spends the rest of his break in the alleyway with Shikamaru, and comes back inside reeking of stale cigarettes. 

It goes on like this for almost a week before Lee gives up. He can take a hint. Gaara regrets kissing him, and Lee has lost his chance. He should stop going to parties, really. They only ever end in heartbreak. 

If he still listens to Gaara’s CD after long, late-night shifts, if his thumb still hovers over Gaara’s contact in his phone when the clouds start rolling in for a summer storm, if his heart still aches when he sees Gaara rain-bedraggled with mud splattered up the back of his calves … well, he’s not hurting anyone aside from himself. 

He keeps his distance. Tries to be respectful. Avoids Gaara the way Gaara so clearly wants to avoid him.

  


* * *

  


Lee’s phone has been buzzing all shift with flash flood alerts and severe thunderstorm warnings. Lightning cracks the storm-dark sky, lighting up the kitchen and lobby like a scene from a film noir. Thunder shakes the cheap tile underfoot; the oven doors rattle in their moorings. 

He catches Gaara on his way to the back door, shouldering the hood of that too-big black sweatshirt up over his visor. 

“Hang on!” Lee slides in front of the door so fast it’s like he’s forgotten his kitchen-safe non-skid shoes. 

Gaara rears up close. His eyes narrow, just harsh blue-white gleams in the shadow of his face. His fists are tensed in his hoodie pocket. For a moment, Lee thinks Gaara might actually hit him.

“Move.” Gaara says, very quietly. “I already clocked out. I’m going home.” 

A roll of thunder tumbles overhead. Lee’s phone goes frantic beeping in his pants pocket. 

“It’s not safe for you to bike home in this!” 

Lee can see the flash of white teeth where Gaara’s started chewing his lower lip. He takes a half-step away from Lee’s outstretched hands. His eyes are slits beneath the hood and his visor. 

A bolt of lightning, so large that the whole room goes briefly bright white, arcs overhead. There’s the sound of cracking wood as it finds home in a nearby tree trunk or electric pole. The lights flicker. Lee blinks the afterimage of Gaara’s startled expression from his eyes. 

“Fine,” Gaara says finally. He steps away from Lee and parks himself by the back door, leaning up against the textured plasticine of the wall inside. 

Lee finishes the dishes in record time. He holds his windbreaker up with his arm spread over Gaara’s head when they both run for the car, waterproof plastic flapping over them both like struggling wings. He cuts the heater on high before dashing back to the door to grab Gaara’s bike under one arm and slam it into the trunk. 

The short drive to Gaara’s apartment complex is pure chaos. Storm clouds tumbleweed over themselves in the sky like a Van Gogh painting, lit up by lightning flashes. Lee can’t hear the music of Gaara’s CD over the crash of thunder, much less the bars Gaara sometimes hums under his breath. The wind howls against the car’s plastic paneling, threatening to push Lee’s little hatchback off the road. Branches and leaves spring loose from trees and scatter across the street like skittish animals. Stoplights swing threateningly overhead at every intersection. Rain hits the windshield with a sound like spattering oil, and Lee is trying so hard to see in the flashes of clarity between the frantic hawing of the windshield wipers that he doesn’t have any brainspace to form words. 

He pulls up outside Gaara’s apartment with a spectacular chicken wing of water, the wave briefly cresting the passenger side window and soaking the curb. 

Gaara moves for the door handle. 

Before he can think better of it, Lee grabs his knee. 

Gaara freezes. He looks down at Lee’s hand. His gaze crawls up Lee’s arm like a creature with a thousand legs to settle on his face. 

_Do you think I'm pretty?_ echoes in Lee's ears. And he does, he does. Even incandescent with icy rage, Gaara is beautiful. 

“Please wait,” Lee says. “Just a moment.” 

Gaara’s shoulders are still stiff, but he turns towards Lee ever-so-slightly. Bone and sinew tense under Lee’s grasp.

“I wanted to apologize,” Lee begins. “I’m sorry for making you feel uncomfortable. If you don’t want to be friends anymore, I completely understand, but I hate that you don’t want to be around me anymore.” He can feel his words speeding up, pressure behind his teeth. His eyes are starting to grow wet the way they always do when his feelings catch up to him. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m sorry for upsetting you. I’ll try not to do it again.”

“What are you talking about.” Gaara’s voice is completely uninflected, face towards the windshield, almost completely drowned out by the pounding rain. “You didn’t do anything. I embarrassed myself in front of you.” 

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about!” Lee’s exclamation comes out as a choked-off yelp. 

“I kissed you, and then I puked in your car.” 

“You were actually quite courteous about it!” Lee protests. “You got out on the side of the road first.”

“I puked _on_ your car.” 

“Well. Yes. But only a little bit. Mostly on the tire. It was almost all the way gone by the time I got home!”

“That’s disgusting.” Gaara’s hands are making shapes in the formless fabric of his sweatshirt, like his fists are clenching and unclenching, fingers spread and then drawn back together. Lee squeezes his knee, hoping for silent reassurance and probably coming across as a death-grip.

“It really did not bother me!” 

In the space between two thunderclaps, Lee hears Gaara’s long inhale. 

“It should have.” Gaara ducks his chin to his chest. “That’s the point.” 

Before Lee can respond, Gaara cracks the door. The hiss of rain floods the car’s interior. 

“Goodnight, Lee.” 

Gaara slips Lee's grasp and disappears between two falling sheets of rain. 

Lee taps his own window before he drives off, just to keep himself company.

  


* * *

  


They have a shift together the next day, although Lee isn’t scheduled to close like Gaara is. Things seem … not resolved, but at least the tension is slightly eased. It feels like a temporary armistice, like he and Gaara are sheltering in foxholes for a holiday meal before they clash again. 

Lee checks the weather before he clocks out for the afternoon, just in case. There’s no storm brewing on the horizon, all the clouds seemingly washed away in the previous day’s deluge. 

“Be safe!” Lee calls as he steps out the back door. 

“What?” Naruto shouts back, but Lee catches the way Gaara’s chin tilts up at him in a little nod from his prep station. That minute gesture is enough to make his heart flutter. 

He leaves his phone at home when he goes for his evening run, because otherwise the temptation to text Gaara to offer him a ride would be too great. Rain is still evaporating off the road in great clouds of steam, absorbed in the hot midsummer air. Lee plows between them, focused on the rhythm of his own footfalls. His old childhood Walkman skips terribly, so he runs without music, but while he jogs in place waiting at the crosswalk, he hums the tune of the song from Gaara’s CD. He doesn’t even mind that the pace of the music slows his step as he circles his neighborhood, dodging cracks in the sidewalk and the places where debris has blocked up the storm drains, forming rivers in the street. 

It’s almost dark by the time he makes it home, and he tries not to think about Gaara as he boils his rice and steams his vegetables, tries not to wonder what he’s been eating without Lee making sure he gets at least one square meal a shift, even if it’s loaded with grease. 

He’s washing up when he hears knocking on his front door. 

Lee turns on the porch light and cracks the curtains. It’s pitch black out, the summer’s late-setting sun finally given up to the night, crickets riotous in their chorus and fireflies’ lanterns studding the small plot of scrub grass he and his roommates call a lawn. 

Standing on his porch, squinting up into the floodlight, is Gaara. 

Lee’s heart thunders so hard it nearly cracks his ribs. He’s suddenly, staggeringly relieved that Neji and Tenten are out at their co-ed Zumba class tonight. 

He throws the door wide without bothering to consider how Gaara might have gotten his address. 

“Gaara?” 

Gaara looks up at him. His narrow chest is shuddering beneath his uniform shirt, panting hard. Behind him, his bike’s pedals still spin idly where the thing is propped up against Lee’s porch railing. He’s clutching a pizza box in one hand. 

“Hi,” Gaara says. His mouth is drawn down into a small, flat line. He holds the pizza box aloft. “Can I come in?” 

Lee steps backwards to grant him entry, and Gaara steps across the threshold with such tentativeness, like he isn’t sure he’s been properly invited. Sweat sticks his hair to the skin on the back of his neck as Lee moves behind him to close the door. He looks small and lost, standing there in Lee’s front hallway. His stare lingers a moment too long on the photos pinned to clothesline strung along the wall, the blackboard paint Lee’s friends have decorated with crude chalk illustrations, scrawled exhortations and stick figures in improbable feats of athleticism. 

Gaara shifts from foot to foot, eyes darting. There’s a telltale circle of grease on the bottom of the cardboard box, evidence the pizza’s been sitting out for too long. 

“Um, you can set that down on the table, if you want?” Lee offers, gesturing Gaara further inside. 

Gaara walks forward like he’s marching to his death, each step taken with careful deliberation. He sets the pizza down, then stares at Lee again. Lee feels Gaara’s eyes on him like hands cupping his face. 

“Can I- ? Do you want me to … open it?” 

“Sure.” Gaara takes a step back. “It’s for you.” His shoulders are pulled tight to his body, every line of him radiating tension. 

Lee cracks the lid of the box like he’s afraid a wild animal will come leaping from the interior. Inside is a meatball pizza, slumped to one side of the box with the crust all crumpled, clearly having been jostled on Gaara’s bike. 

Gaara draws another of those long breaths. A sharp white canine scrapes the corner of his lower lip. 

“I was going to make it in the shape of a heart,” he says, “but I don’t know how.” 

“What- ?” Lee feels his whole face crumpled in confusion. There’s a few hasty marks in Sharpie on the inside of the lid, like someone started to write something and then scratched it out. And sure, sometimes they draw silly things in the pizza box if a customer asks for it, but why would Gaara … ? 

“And then I thought about writing a line on the inside, but that seemed too cheesy.” 

Lee stifles a giggle behind his hand. Gaara’s head snaps up. 

“What?” 

“Nothing,” Lee says quickly. “Just. You realize that was a pun, right?” 

“I didn’t until I said it.” Gaara’s throat works. The fine bones of his hands flex as he opens and closes his fists. “Listen,” he says. “I’m sorry. I want to do this the right way or not at all.” 

“Do what?” 

Gaara kisses his teeth. The air in the room goes still with his drawn breath. 

“Will you go out with me?” Gaara spits the words with his eyes closed, wincing backwards like he’s afraid of the answer. 

Lee’s mouth falls open. Outside on the porch, the cicadas are screaming. The ceiling fan clicks slowly overhead, pushing stale air around the room. 

“Of course I will!” Lee nearly springs across the table to pull Gaara into a hug. His entire frail body goes stiff under the force of Lee’s embrace. “I was so worried you hated me!” 

“You would know if I hated you,” Gaara says, muffled into the fabric of Lee’s tank top. Lee’s nose presses the top of his head; he smells like sweat and pizza dough, like coffee grounds and stick deodorant. Gaara’s hands pat at Lee’s sides, half a return of the embrace and half tapping out. 

Lee releases him only to realize he’s been holding Gaara’s toes an inch off the floor. Gaara stares up at him, rumpled and wide-eyed, his visor tilting off his head at an angle. After a moment’s seeming deliberation, he reaches out and grabs Lee’s hand. He swings their joined limbs between them, still staring. A twitch works at the corner of his mouth, the promise of a future smile. 

“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” Lee announces, apropos of nothing, lost in the shine of Gaara’s eyes. “Can I drive you to work?” 

“Sure,” Gaara says, stroking the back of Lee’s knuckles with his thumb. “I'll make us a CD.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you guys ever heard that episode of MBMBAM where a guy's wife says her first swear word? Lee's little outburst was based on that. Also I'm sorry for dressing Lee up like a frat star. Come yell at me about it on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com).


End file.
